


Enough

by squireofgeekdom



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 22:14:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2204955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squireofgeekdom/pseuds/squireofgeekdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drifting with a Kaiju is not without its aftereffects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

He cannot stop seeing them.

The kaiju. So many. Unborn and growing and dying.

The glow of the breach.

And the others. The commanders - the leaders - he cannot translate the thoughts. Watching. Waiting. So beautiful.

The dreams leave him sleeping fitfully, yawning in the lab even after his third cup of coffee. His reaction times are slower, he makes sloppy mistakes with his data that Hermann mocks him for, but he can’t bring himself to regret the dreams. 

If only I could see them again -

But the memory of the panic in the public shelter, the grotesque - grotesque, not beautiful, how could he ever think it was beautiful - tongue reaching-

So he draws them.

He draws them, and hands the sketches to the artist in the tattoo parlor. 

They don’t quite match the anime-esque, pop art stylings of his first tattoos, even though he tries. The colors need to be darker, richer, the edges subtler, not quite so bold, to even begin to reflect the images from the drift. 

The first tattoo is a failure. The colors are too bright, cartoonish. It’s nothing like what he sees every time he closes his eyes.

He finds a new tattoo parlor.

The artist is better here, with a wider range of inks. Each tattoo takes longer, but the pain is worth it to have the images there, part of him.

He brings another mirror into his house, sets it across from the one in his bathroom, better to see the tattoos that are now crawling across his back. 

He sprawls on the cool tile before bed, just staring at them.

The margins of each lab notebook are covered with the image of the breach.

“Hermann?”  
“Yes, Newton?”

He shuffles. It is, after all, a strange question, he realizes, now that he is faced with Hermann’s disapproving stare. 

“Do you think they’ll ever be able to reopen the breach? The kaiju, I mean.” He adds hurriedly.

“Of course not, that’s ridiculous -” Hermann’s frown fades for a second, and he looks up at the ceiling absently, processing. “Well -” He moves his chair over to the computer projector and begins waving his hands over, rebuilding diagrams, his voice getting faster and faster as the ideas become clearer in his mind, and when he is done Newt rushes back to his desk and scribbles it all down into a fresh notebook.

Better to be prepared, right?

His tattoo artist beams when he walks in, calls him his best customer. The tattoos are darker now, as his dreams have provided him with more and more vivid landscapes and portraits.

He wakes from his dreams in a cold sweat now. His dreams are no longer just fragments of the memories from the drift. Now he walks in a kaiju’s form. He understands everything about them, from the inside out, and is left clutching for that certainty in the morning.

He can never hold on to it.

His old tattoos disgust him now - they are embarrassingly childish, a mockery of what he has seen. He has them burned away.

The moment he takes the bandages off he is pushing open the door of the tattoo parlor, sheafs of paper in his hands. His forearms are covered with new tattoos, and there still isn’t enough space.

The tattoo artist no longer beams when he walks in. He catches the worry in her eyes in moments when she thinks he is too distracted by the pain (as if he could be distracted by pain now, when he works through the constant pull of the drift). 

Her emotion fills him with disdain.

It doesn’t stop her from putting the new tattoos on his hands - detailed images of kaiju hands. Now when he wakes up in the morning, he hopes, the descent into humanity won’t be quite so jarring.

He almost goes down to one of the body modification shops to get claws put on them as well, but that would make it impossible for him to handle the delicate instruments he needs to work with in the lab, the only way to know more -

(Except for his dreams, his dreams where he understands everything, everything he could ever need to know -)

As it is, the bandages on his hands keep him out of the lab for a week (it should have been two, but he’s running out of paper in his house to draw and he knows some tricks to keep the swelling down and what is pain to him anymore) 

When he comes back, Hermann is asking after his health. 

Concern is a strange look on him.

Staring at Hermann’s chalkboards late at night (so late, Herman’s been gone for hours, and his dreams are calling him) he finds that the memory of Hermann’s soft frown only brings him contempt. So weak.

Washing the blood from the last dissection off of his hands, he stares down at the intricate scales on his fingers. Bile rises in his throat, and he only just makes it to the toilet.

Staring down at his own vomit, splattering the toilet bowl, he asks himself: How could I think that? How could I ever think that? Hermann’s not weak. He couldn’t be.

Staring down at his own hands, his eyelids crawling open as he wakes up, crumpled at his lab desk in the morning, he laughs. 

I’m weak.

Ridiculous, like the drawings on his hands could make him stronger. 

Pathetic. 

He abandons the dissection.

He starts drawing again.

The paper he tears out of his lab notebooks isn’t big enough, the clean lines on the graph paper are a distraction, he buys rolls of butcher paper, trying the endless variations of paints, of brushes, leaving the floor of his house splattered with paint after each failure, because this, this last desperate attempt, has to be perfect. 

It has to be perfect. 

It has to be enough.

The tattoo artist can only stare at the roll of paper that he shoves through the door of the shop, but she accepts the fee he offers, a sum he might have thought was astronomical when money still mattered.

When the needles move to his face, the pain becomes enough to distract him from the image of the breach. 

It is as though he has lost a limb. 

The bandages have to stay on for three weeks. She is insistent about this.

He takes them off after three days.

He looks at himself in both mirrors, covered in scales, wrapping around his chest, up his now bare scalp, over his eyelids -

His eyes are streaked with black. Tears won’t come.

It will never be enough.

 

 

 

The Breach is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

It is enough.


End file.
